USS Grandeur - One... More... Time!

My eyes want the lower sensor dome (or whatever the doohickey is that you added to the centerpoint of the saucer) to be an "outie" instead of an "innie". You already have the wraparound scoopouts on either side of the dome assembly... surrounding the sensor dome with another scoopout seems like too much of a good thing.

Regarding the aforementioned scoopouts, I have a question: Is the purpose of these features to allow for vertical portholes on the underside of the saucer? If so, the Grandeur is much larger than I thought, because those scoopouts don't look nearly deep enough to be the height of one deck at the scale I thought your ship was designed (which is about how deep they'd need to cut into the hull in order for eye-level portholes to be accomodated).

Don't touch anything else. The Grandeur is one of the most creative and original non-canon designs I've ever seen, and you should be justifiably proud of your work.

Professor Moriarty said:
Regarding the aforementioned scoopouts, I have a question: Is the purpose of these features to allow for vertical portholes on the underside of the saucer? If so, the Grandeur is much larger than I thought, because those scoopouts don't look nearly deep enough to be the height of one deck at the scale I thought your ship was designed (which is about how deep they'd need to cut into the hull in order for eye-level portholes to be accomodated).

Click to expand...

The "scoopouts" immediately surrounding the sensor dome are NOT there to accommodate windows. Frankly, I'm not sure what they're for, probably part of the sensor array itself. You should also know that I intend to add some additional features in that area, including a quantorp launcher in front of the dome. What you see right now is just the start.

I'll have to disagree on the point of the lower sensor dome - I like the detailing of the inverted area. It's a nice change from the typical and obvious way most 'fleet designs simply mount it at the bottom peak of the saucer.

My only quibble has been and remains the finlets on the nacelle 'wings' - I don't know what alternative there may be, but they've always looked superfluous to me, like legs to keep the model off the table, or prevent it from tipping over (oddly enough, though, similar structures on Vanguard look great, at least when they are directly vertical - they also lose something when canted).

Ptrope said:
I like the detailing of the inverted area. It's a nice change from the typical and obvious way most 'fleet designs simply mount it at the bottom peak of the saucer.

Click to expand...

In this case it was as much practical as aesthetic. I needed something at the base of the saucer but I was very limited on height because of the line of fire from the photorp launchers above the deflector dish.

My only quibble has been and remains the finlets on the nacelle 'wings' - I don't know what alternative there may be, but they've always looked superfluous to me, like legs to keep the model off the table, or prevent it from tipping over...

Click to expand...

Those "finlets" were inspired by the warp rudders on the uber-Enterprise-D from All Good Things. They were a requirement of the design given to me by Capt Roop and the gang that I was not originally in favor of, but I have grown used to them on this ship to the point that it no longer looks right or correctly ballanced without them.

I'm finally making some progress on the secondary hull. Here's a shot of the main deflector and the photorp launcher mounted above it:

The depth-of-field effect was inspired by the photos that recently popped up online of the Trek starship miniatures just before they were sold at auction. I love the way it looks but this one rendering took over 20 minutes so I probably won't be doing it too often.

Here are a couple more:

A few things to note about the model's current state:

1. The hull textures are my usual generic placeholders and will eventually be replaced .
2. Several objects still need to have their edges chamfered to soften them a little bit. Just haven't gotten around to all of them yet.
3. If you're wondering what happened to the ring inside the deflector cowling, it will return. I was going to rebuild it today but I wound up spending almost all my time on the torpedo launchers. Speaking of which...
4. The reason the launcher on the underside of the deflector only has one tube is because it's a quantum torpedo launcher. I have some more greebles to add on either side of the tube as well. Oh, and the red glow would probably not be there unless they were preparing to fire; I just threw it in for dramatic effect.

For anyone who's interested, current polycount is a little over 207,000. That's actually down from almost 220,000 before I started optimizing the larger Sub-D objects, even with the addition of the torp launchers. With most of the optimizing left to go, I'm hopeful of keeping the finished model under 200,000, including modeled windows.

The only thing I can spot that doesn't seem just right are those gold circular tube things that are connected to the photon torpedo launchers. They just don't seem right to me. Perhaps some kind of targeting sensors could take their place.

It's a single "column," if you want to call it that. I don't really have a purpose for it other than to fill the space below the launcher. I have a few ideas for a different structural arrangement under there, though, so it really isn't final.